After two months of being in Korea and loving it, I had my first breakdown earlier this week. How it happened: For the past two months, I've been a bit sleep deprived. Ever since I started taking my Korean language classes, I've been at school basically from 9 in the morning to 9 at night so that I don't get back to my apartment til 10:30. Needless to say being so busy during the week, I make sure I make the most out of my free time during the weekends. I've been running around anywhere and everywhere these past few weeks, so exhausting was sneaking up on me.
On top of that, the weather suddenly decided to drop 20 degrees overnight. It was mid-50s on day, and when I woke up the next, it was low-30s. And although I've been trying to prepare for the cold (spent a good chunk of my paycheck paying a whole new winter wardrobe), I have found that I'm not cut out for the cold. I'm the most bundled out of anyone on the streets, and yet I feel I'm still the coldest and I hate it.
As if being cold when going around outside and being sleep-deprived weren't enough, my apartment's heater has failed to work adaquately. So that night it dropped 20 degrees, even though I turned up heater up to its max, my apartment still felt like an ice box. I was so cold in my apartment that I couldn't get a wink of sleep.
The next day, I show up to work utterly miserable. Naturally, I tell my co-teacher there's something wrong with my heater, and we get the afternoon off from work to try and fix it. When we get to my apartment, my co-teacher explains that since I technically live in an Officetel and not a normal residential building, my heater is not going to be as warm. I don't know why, but this news and the thought of freezing in my apartment all winter long made me super upset. Consequently, I was a bit short with my co-teacher even though she was trying to help me as best she can translating for me to the maintanence guy.
Later on in the car on the way to our night classes (I take Korean and she takes graduate classes), my co-teacher confronts me on my attitude back at the apartment. She was completely right, but the next thing I know, I'm crying my eyes out and I can't stop. I don't know if it was the lack of sleep or the shock of being so cold for the first time in years, but for the first time, I realized just how much I missed LA and my nice warm, sunny weather that I couldn't help myself.
My co-teacher felt so bad. Poor thing. Even though I was completely wrong and out-of-line for being rude, she ended up apologizing to me for not considering my much the cold would affect me. She felt so bad that dropped by later that night after our classes to bring me a thick blanket from her house!
It's kinda sad I'm such a pansy to the cold. Both my co-teacher and I don't know how I'm going to survive the winter, but hopefully, I'll be able to toughen up a bit. We'll see...
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